An autonomous locomotive that pulls a series of "pallet trailers" holding standardised "boxes"

A network of "shunting yards" to rationalise journeys.

The loco can disassemble a pallet and deliver to the door

(A bit like Victorian trains really!)

Making the goods train, low axle weight and just big enough to carry a standard pallet, means that two would fit side-by-side in a EU standard road-lane, and Road damage obeys a fourth power of axle-weight law!

Lewis bias

I'll (and other should) pop at any journalist who consistently, over several years, cherry picks what he covers to provide an emphasis to his personal view. I.e. Not a reporter but a politician. Without a disclaimer that he IS cherry picking.

Let me set up a competitor ( And anyone else)

DNS operation need NOT a monopoly. One could set up an alternate services with alternate defined terms and conditions.

I fancy that the ICANN DNS database "SHOULD" be legitimately mined, but even without doing it, a clever set of Ts&Cs ( $0 price for registration) and automated registration could create a usable copy pretty quickly..

Ts&Cs by TLD could include domains that define jurisdiction, domains that "promise" Kosher, Halal, Christian, Free Speech, only sites ....

Academics need a reality check

Many academics are pro-EU because a lot of their funding passes through EU programmes. They don't realise that out of the EU, the same funds will be there, but without EU admin taking a 20% slice, rules that make them "partner" with second rate EU universities, rather than first rate global ones, and that the money is allocated to EU political "priorities", not scientific ones.

Er, Red Shift not just velocity then?

"That's what links the supervoid to the possible acceleration of the universe's expansion: over the 1.8 billion years between ingress and egress, the universe around the photons became less dense, leaving less stuff to give the photons back their kinetic energy."

We Internet pioneers breathe a sigh of relief

Net neutrality was a major factor in the success of the Internet over other proprietary networks. If the broadband providers ever get the right to extort taxes for transit, then the internet will be no more, just a small number of proprietary network with ever reducing connectivity to aid tax collection.

Bait and Switch

US policyalways follows the money

US policy is governed by how many $s a lobby is prepared to spend to get the laws they want. ( Get rid of any ideas that the US is a democracy, or rational decision making, or indeed policy for the benefit of the US public!)

SO who has the deepest pockets/prepared to pay the most to the "lobby"?

The Cable companies have the cash flow, but the service providers have the share price.

My bet is the Cable companies as they have been playing the lobby game for longer and know the buttons to press.

UDI

All the key gTLDs need to do is declare UDI and set up a new directorate.

They'd need to "steal" the .com and other non gTLD databases. But ICANN has "stolen" the new TLDs for itself anyway.

Personally, I think it is time for the balkanisation of DNS anyway. The whole system is corrupt and abused. From here-today-gone-tomorrow fraudulent domains, through to the ransoming of domain names and domain squatters.

Global Resource Observatory

The project is looking to map the worlds resources and test the system for fragility.

If you want to worry about anything, then it is POLITICS that you should care about!

It turns out that we now have a finely tuned world. Like any system close to optimum, it is sensitive to perturbations of parameters,with wild swings E.g. Low global rice or wheat yields have resulted in riots.

A major perturbation, such as a trade war between trading blocks, can make the whole thing collapse.

Who wull they target?

Not the CEOs of the Big Banks who happily shift funds to Nigeria from Joe Public accounts without any sort of escrow arrangement. Or the current scam where they allow a new account to be opened, fund transfer from a dupe and exit in a few days.

No they will target the "pub landlord" who changes money on the side because the banks charge so much to make a cash deposit!

IPv7 is a National Security Risk!

If the Internet returns to a full meshed true Internet, The ability of our security services to monitor Internet traffic will be severely compromised. They currently rely on IPv4 NAT to bottleneck traffic making monitoring much easier.

Read the paper, not the report

Lazy journalism is where they recycle other journalists output, without going back to the original source.

Certainly the UK running out of energy report, was about the LOCAL reserves, if International trade shutdown. E.g. The Ukraine became a east-west showdown.... The report SHOULD be a wake-up call to pollicy makers who assume business as usual has permanence!

Second, true we will never "runout" of resources. But the price and the cost of extraction can change very rapidly.

Third, one has to look at the timing supply chain adaptation. It has taken nearly a decade to restart the non-chinese rare-earth extraction supply chain. Converting refineries to changing raw materials...